"Weapons" and the Long Tail of Covid

A new horror film is enrapturing America, and it’s well-worth your time. Weapons tells the story of seventeen schoolchildren who all disappear in the early morning and aren’t heard from again. They belong to the same classroom in a small Pennsylvania town and their young teacher is initially blamed for their absence. The film lingers on the teacher, a recovering alcoholic who rekindles her affair with a bumbling local cop, but it wisely takes in the scope of the whole town: we meet a flustered principal, a homeless junkie, an aggrieved father of one of the missing children, and, finally, the one boy who remained in the teacher’s class and will be the key to unraveling the mystery. The structure calls to mind, for me at least, Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, which derives its power from that sort of human sweep: a town is an organism and its cells, growing and dying, are its people. Weapons, gory and horrifying and often funny, doesn’t lose sight of this.